Running Out of Spoopendykes

I think the count may be close to about eighty now, but it seems that we are fast running out of Stanley Huntley's Spoopendyke stories! Huntley only did these things for the last five years of his life, and many of them did not appear in the Brooklyn Eagle, but in the extremely hard-to-find Drake's Traveller's Magazine. We have managed to get some Spoopendyke stories that were reprinted from Drake's in contemporary newspapers, in New York and New Zealand, but there aren't many of those left to read.

Still, Huntley wrote lots of funny stuff besides tales of Mr. and Mrs. Spoopendyke, and we usually try to feature some of those pieces in the Basement's Sunday Salad feature. These include his tales of cowboys, miners, and other wild and wooly folk from out west, stories of con men, gamblers, crooked politicians and preachers, nutty inventors, and other loonies from Brooklyn. He also did a handful of stories of Mr. and Mrs. Breezy -- not as well-defined as the Spoopendykes, but generally making fun of modern life and manners. And of course, there are lots of spoofs of popular authors of his day, such as the "Jules Verne, Jr." story we read a while back.

So the big question to you, the listeners of Mister Ron's Basement, is whether we should continue with Sunday Salad without the Spoopendykes (except when we stumble into an undiscovered story), or should we put the series on the shelf, and replace it with something else -- maybe the poetry of Eugene Field?

Please post your reply here, or send an email to revry@panix.com. We'd love to know what you think!